The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (28 page)

—Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

 

S
INCE THE END
of apartheid, it has become commonplace among South Africans, particularly middle-class whites, to mourn not apartheid but the world that passed with it, a world that predated its demise by at least a hundred years. What they miss most keenly is the safety they had enjoyed—at home, on the street, in the car. In place of that world is now a sort of civil anarchy that has caused many to leave the country and those who stay to take shelter behind high walls and electrified fences, alarm systems, panic buttons, and security guards.

Not long ago, they point out, children were free to bicycle around the streets and women to drive wherever they wished, day or night. Cars could be parked without a guard to pay off. Restaurants didn't have to lock you in behind wrought-iron gates. Even the vast numbers of poor were safer—just ask them how
they
cope with this siege of violence.

And yet violence was always implicit in South African life, and often explicit as well. If guns were scarce before the eighties, knives certainly were not. Knife fights, flick knives, stabbings, stabbings, stabbings—these were the daily fare of newspaper reporting during the fifties, sixties, seventies. And if they were largely confined to ne'er-do-wells and Africans, well, we all knew it was only a matter of time before it was going to climb the hill to find us.

So when our garden boy came home half dead one day, stabbed just under the heart, I stared down at the wound as into an omen. There it was, a dark, moist, oozing thing, no distinction between dark skin and dark blood, and the gleaming white rib at the center of it. Even at the age of six or seven, I knew exactly what I was seeing: I was seeing the future. Except that for us, there would be no chance of a doctor stitching up the wound. For us, the knife was going to be drawn deep across the throat.

Much of my childhood anxiety was spent concocting ways to save myself when the Knife-at-the-Throat bloodbath actually came—where to hide, whom I could count on for help (the nanny, although at the top of the list, would, at least in theory, be part of the same knife-wielding rampage). We all knew how it would happen. One night, without warning, our servants would rise as one, snatch up knives from their various kitchens, and rush next door to slit some white throats. Turn around, and there, in the doorway, would be Josiah, the Sullivans' cook, eyes wild with
dagga
(marijuana) and their carving knife at the ready. Our own servants, we knew, would not be able to bring themselves to slit our throats. They'd go over to the Sullivans, or to old Mrs. Holmes on the other side. She was always complaining about the noise we made on the cricket lawn and wouldn't give back the balls we hit over the hedge. And so, in a sense, it would serve her right.

 

Meanwhile, I kept watch. On a Sunday afternoon, if Zulus were pouring down the hill on their way to their faction fighting, I would sit at the study window, keeping a firm eye on them. At that time faction fights were ritualistic affairs, and many Zulus were dressed in traditional warrior regalia—skins and rattles and headbands. They jumped and whistled and shouted and shook their clubs and sticks in the air, whipping themselves into a frenzy for the contest that was going to take place down on the soccer fields at the beach.

All it would take, I knew, was for one of them to leap our fence and come crashing through the bed of cannas for the bloodbath to start right there, at our house, never mind that that wasn't the way it was supposed to happen. It had happened already in Kenya with the Mau Mau, a phrase that could spark terror in the heart of anyone, let alone a frantic child checking behind the wardrobe before she could bring herself to leap onto the bed and under the covers.

And so when I woke up one night to the sight of a strange man at the foot of my eldest sister's bed, I was sure it had begun, and that no amount of cunning was going to save me now. We were at a holiday hotel in the mountains, my sisters and I in one room, my parents in the other, and the door firmly closed between us.

I lay as still as stone, moving only my eyes. My bed was lower than the others'—a sort of camp bed, brought in by the hotel and wedged into a corner. All I could see from down there was the man's hat, and the way his head bent over my sister's bed. Maybe he'd slashed her throat already, I thought, and was just checking to see if she was dead.

But what if he wasn't a native? What if he was a Coloured and didn't even have a knife? Coloureds, we knew, weren't going to rise up against us, because they were better off than the natives and wanted to keep it that way. Our Coloured housekeeper had a bedroom next to mine, and used the children's bathroom, and ate the same food as we did, but in the kitchen, and off different dishes.

I took another look, but it was impossible to tell. In the dark he could even have been an Indian. An Indian had once lured a girl in my class into an alley, and he'd made her pull down her pants, and a nurse, leaning out an upstairs window, had seen them down there and called the police. And after that the girl had seemed different, as if she had a birthmark down her face, or a limp, or a mother who had died.

But no one ever thought Indians would rise up and slit our throats either. They worked as waiters and gardeners and behind stalls at the Indian market. Some of them had shops down on Grey Street, and my mother knew them, and they knew her. Come the revolution, she said, the natives were as likely to slit their throats as ours. Everyone knew natives hated Indians. When the natives had rioted against them and burned down their shops, a native had thrown a brick at my uncle, who was dark and looked a bit like an Indian himself. And when Pillay, our gardener, had to use the toilet in the servants' quarters, they weren't at all pleased, the housegirl told me. Indians were dirty, she said, they stank of curry and hair oil, phew, and also they cheated you. Except that she called them “coolies,” a word we were never allowed to use.

The man glided to the foot of my middle sister's bed. Now that he was closer, I tried to sniff for curry or hair oil. But there was only the smell of the room—coir matting and furniture polish. And outside the crickets were singing as if everything were normal. The window was wide open as usual, never mind that we were on the ground floor, because however much they threw the phrase around, my parents were far more concerned about fresh air than they were about the Knife at the Throat. At home, the French doors onto the verandas were fastened back day and night, upstairs and downstairs, the windows too. But when I worried about this, they just pointed out that the only invaders we'd ever had were monkeys, which would reach into the kitchen to snatch something from the table and then gibber up with it into the mango tree, the dogs in pursuit.

It was the dogs, really, that were meant to protect us. As long as they lay around our feet, cocking an ear for someone to chase—anyone, in fact, who didn't belong in the house—we were supposed to feel safe. Just let the garden boy emerge from the servants' quarters and they'd be after him in a pack, barking, snarling, snapping. The same held for Pillay, and for delivery boys, and for the Zulus pouring down the hill on a Sunday afternoon.

And yet what good were they now, here in a hotel in the mountains, with a man staring down at my middle sister? They were hundreds of miles away, at the kennels. And anyway, how many dogs would it take when all the servants rose up at once with their knives and sticks? Even Superman, our houseboy, had managed to slice Simba's ear with the stick he carried to protect himself walking between the kitchen and the garage, or back to his room in the servants' quarters. And when an enemy put a curse on him one day and he came to say he was leaving and wanted his wages, it was almost as if the dogs themselves were cursed too, because they just stood back and watched as he walked to the gate, carrying his cardboard suitcase.

The man turned toward my corner. And just as I was thinking that whatever he was I would leap up before he could get to me and scream at the top of my lungs—just then, he turned and walked over to the window. I pushed myself up a bit to see, and yes, there he was, climbing out, first one leg and then the other, and he was still wearing his hat.

As soon as he was gone, I jumped out of bed and burst through the door leading into my parents' room. But they were too fast asleep to take me seriously. Eventually, though, my mother did climb out of her bed and lead me back to my own, agreeing, for once, to close the window. And then, the next morning, as soon as I heard the early-morning tea trolley rattling down the passage, I was back at their bedside.

Something about my insistence must have caught their attention at last, because when he'd finished his tea, my father put on his dressing gown and slippers and came through to our room to question my sisters. They scoffed, of course—they'd seen nothing, heard nothing. But then, opening the window to let in some fresh air, he noticed some soil on the windowsill. And when he leaned out, there, in the flowerbed below, were four large footprints—two on their way in and two on their way out.

 

No one ever found out who or what the man was, and no one but me believed he could have had anything to do with the Knife at the Throat. And so on we went, doors and windows open, dogs in place, until the real terror began—coming not at all as we'd expected, but haphazardly, here or there, day or night, with guns as well as knives, because by then guns were almost as plentiful and cheap as hamburgers, and the dogs themselves were the first to be shot—until then we carried on with the paradise of our lives: luxurious but not rich, safe and yet threatened, carefree if one did not think too carefully about the future.

FROM
Esquire

 

T
HE FENCE STARTS
about 80 feet out into the Pacific. It's made of metal pylons and looks like a procession of old telephone poles, each jutting about 20 feet above the waves. The pylons are spaced tightly together, and there's a sign warning of additional barriers below the waterline. Once the fence hits dry land, it marches east across the beach, and then, on a little hill that begins where the beach ends, it changes. It becomes, in fact, two fences, a double barrier. Compared with the single-ply barrier on the beach and in the water, these two fences—sturdy square beams supporting tight rows of whitewashed steel spindles—look much more modern and formidable, like prison fences. One of the two fences picks up right where the beach fence leaves off and continues east along the actual borderline, while the other follows a parallel line a few dozen feet to the north of it.

The buffer zone between the two fences is reserved exclusively for the use of the U.S. Border Patrol, with one exception: at the top of the hill, there is a little door in the northern fence, and a sign informs that twice a week, Saturdays and Sundays from 10
A.M.
until 2
P.M.
, U.S. citizens are allowed to enter. Then, if there happen to be Mexicans on the other side of the second, southern fence, the Americans are allowed to look at them and talk with them, though reaching through the fence or attempting “physical contact with individuals in Mexico” is prohibited. A portion of the American side of the visiting area has been paved with cement, in the shape of a semicircle, and there is an identical semicircle on the Mexican side of the fence.

The official name of this place is the “Friendship Circle.”

A big marble obelisk stands in the center of the circle. There is a break in the southern fence to accommodate the obelisk, and some additional fencing around the break to keep anyone from trying to squeeze through.

In 1851 some men from something called the International Boundary Commission placed the obelisk here. Back then, the Mexican-American War had just ended, and Mexico had agreed to surrender more than half its territory to the United States, including the places now called California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The job of the International Boundary Commission was to come up with a map of the revised frontier between the two countries. They started here, on this beachfront hill, and installed the obelisk as their first survey marker.

Then they walked east, into the borderlands.

A geographer described accounts of the International Boundary Commission's expedition as the “stuff that dime novels are made of,” complete with “deaths from starvation and yellow fever, struggles for survival in the desert, and the constant threat of violent attacks by Indians and filibusters.”

Back then, of course, those surveyors had no choice when it came to transportation: in order to see the border, they had to travel either by foot or by horse.

Today there are lots of alternatives. You could fly from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico in a few hours, or could drive the distance in a few days.

But there's still something to be said, when you want to really understand something, for slowing way down.

So this morning I'm taking my cue from the men who planted this obelisk.

I start on the beach.

I walk east.

 

The border's simple.

It heads due east from the beach straight across California until it hits the Colorado River, at which point it backtracks a bit, squiggling southwest along the river's edge before firming up again and slicing across the bottom of Arizona in two long straight lines. Shortly after reaching New Mexico, it suddenly jogs north for a few dozen miles, but then quickly resumes its straight, eastward course all the way to Texas, where it merges with the Rio Grande and rides out the final stretch to the Gulf.

The border's complicated.

From a distance it looks like an impossible tangle of Minutemen and La Migra, drugs and money, fence builders and fence hoppers. It's tempting to look away. But we shouldn't. The border is the place where we end and they begin, which makes it the definition of a defining place.